II
The result of our preliminary examination may be summarised as the posing of two deductions: the first, that the deliberate, intellectual use in the pages of a novel of the teachings of psycho-analysis produces an effect upon the reader that may be variously irritating, unconvincing, and negligible, but is rarely, if ever, psychologically valuable; the second, that a writer of genius such as Dostoevsky has, in one sense, forestalled the conclusions of this branch of psychology and used them to the benefit of literature. At first sight these two deductions may appear to disclose an inherent contradiction, namely, that the theories of psycho-analysis can and cannot be used for the purposes of fiction; but this apparent contradiction is instantly resolved by a consideration of the manner of treatment. Briefly we may assume that, according to precedent, a true form of self-expression must bear the impress of spontaneity, and hence that a novelist's learning is comparatively valueless to him until it has been so assimilated and transmuted as to become a personal experience and conviction.
This last proposition, however, opens the second phase of our thesis, presenting as it does the obvious deduction that such a theory as that of psycho-analysis properly comprehended and applied may become a powerful influence in the novel of the future. But to decide that we must consider, first, how far the theory is a new one, and, secondly, in what respects it illuminates the problems of normal psychology.
The answer to the first question can be stated quite briefly. The knowledge of the facts upon which Freud's pathological method was founded are as old as folk-lore. Certain symbols that the modern practitioner recognises as having a peculiar significance in the dreams of his patient are the same symbols that were used not only in Greek and Norse mythologies, but also in the most primitive rites of the savage. What is new is primarily the pathological method by which the unconscious mind may be induced to reveal its dangerous secrets; but from the study of this method there is arising the outline of a new psychology for which we have no true precedent. Glimmerings and faint foreshadowings there may have been, but no sure recognition or understanding; and the answer to our second question involves some inquiry into what this new psychology implies.
Let me begin by saying that psycho-analysis throws very little light on the problem of the survival of the personality, and Dr. Jung, in his address to the Society for Psychical Research last April, refused to admit the probability of any authentic message having been received from departed spirits. We are able, therefore, to confine ourselves strictly to the study of humanity in its normal, that is to say, in its terrestrial, condition, and find our main point of convergence from older psychologies in the intensive observation of that element of our make-up which is now commonly spoken of as "the unconscious."
A scholarly history designed to collate the main facts of man's attitude towards and tentative realisations of his own duality would make uncommonly interesting reading; but outside religion and imaginative literature no real attempt was made to characterise the unconscious mind until Freud began to practise a pathology that relied upon the interpretation of dreams as an essential part of the method of diagnosis. In the past the oneirocritic was solely concerned with the significance of the dream in so far as it foretold the future; the Freudian analysis, before Jung restored the balance of factors, was equally single-minded in relating it to the past. And this change of attitude—so startling in its implications that it almost makes a break in the continuity of thought—tended very quickly to crystallise a host of speculations that had awaited a unifying hypothesis. For this method of interpreting the dream, supported as it was by verifiable results in the patient's nervous, mental, and physical condition, could only signify that we are endowed with a double consciousness, and that under a suitable stimulus the deeper consciousness could be examined and, as I have said, characterised. We are, in short, confronted with the theorem of a dual personality[24] in every human being, in which the second person has peculiar and essential functions, both in connection with our sanity and with our physical well-being. What precisely is the scope of these functions we are not yet in a position to say, but we can formulate with reasonable certainty various characteristic activities, tendencies and modes of expression, common to this second personality, that are of the greatest importance to modern psychology.
[24] In using the term "dual personality" I beg an essential question for the sake of a convenient image; but it must not be assumed that what I describe hereafter as a second personality is recognised as such by psychologists. It is possible that the unconscious bears some such relation to the conscious as desire bears to purpose, instinct to reason, or reflexive to deliberative action. But see also in this connection De l'Inconscient au Conscient, by Dr. Gustave Geley, Paris. 1919.
We must, for example, face the deduction that the unconscious can suffer from a queer and hitherto unrecognised form of ill-health. A sudden fright, for instance, more particularly in childhood, has apparently the effect of breaking the liaison in this one particular relation between the conscious and the unconscious minds. The shock itself, whatever it may be, is not remembered by the conscious mind, and this failure of contact between the unconscious and objective reality seems to produce a condition comparable to nervous worry. Speaking figuratively, one may say that the second personality becomes the victim of a growing obsession, and begins to concentrate its efforts more and more upon signalling its message of distress. And surely the strangest of all the strange facts that have recently been described concerning this amazing partnership of ours is that the second personality cannot communicate with the first except in the language of symbol. The means by which that vital message can be transmitted is, generally, in the first instance by a dream. But this dream does not picture the actual circumstances of the original shock, but seeks to describe it by a method that Dr. Maurice Nicoll has compared to that of the political cartoon. Night after night the message of distress is delivered with diligent ingenuity in a picture language the images of which are frequently taken from casual and unimportant experiences of the dreamer's waking life, such experiences being presented in the form of an allegory which, rightly interpreted, has a bearing on the urgent cause of distress. When this mode of communication fails, more drastic steps are taken and the physical actions of the body may be influenced in the form of a mania. A youth or a young woman shocked by a sudden sexual experience or revelation to the point of conscious forgetfulness of the incident in question may develop a mania for the continued cleansing of the hands—again, be it noted, the message being conveyed by a symbol. Or the effect may be the development of a phobia that in extreme cases may cause the death of the patient.
Now, the points of immediate interest in this amazing process are, firstly, what may be called the anxiety of the unconscious to communicate its distress; and, secondly, the inability to convey its message by any means other than that of symbol. From the former observation it may perhaps be inferred, inter alia, that it is vital to the functions of the unconscious that it should have universal touch with the objective realities of its partner; from the second, that the existence of a trauma causing a breach between the two minds is of such a nature that direct communication becomes impossible along that particular circuit. For, although it is true that the majority of dreams emerge in this form, they also contain now and then plain statements that solve a perplexity; and it is difficult to understand why in cases of such vital urgency, an image of the conditions responsible for the original trauma should not be directly presented, unless there is some nervous dissociation—it may be an actual physical displacement or temporary rearrangement of cell tissue—producing a restricted amnesia in the conscious mind.
Proceeding now with the characterisation of the unconscious, we come to that aspect of it which has above all others tickled and excited the popular imagination. In this aspect the unconscious figures as the crouching beast of desire, the primitive immoral instigator of all the animal passions, a thing of wonderful abilities and capable of amazing physical dexterities, but before all else unethical and uncivilised. But sorry as I am to destroy so romantic and intriguing a creation, I must admit that Dr. Jung's researches do not uphold this view of the unconscious as a universal type. It is, indeed, well established in the mythologies and appears as the serpent, a favourite symbol, in the second chapter of Genesis; but the individual may at once put away the fear, or the hope, that he himself is harbouring so fearful a beast. For, if we may argue from those abnormal instances that furnish the bolder illustrations of tendency, we have excellent grounds for following Jung in the assumption that the unconscious is the complement of the conscious. Is a man brutal, then he is suppressing the urgency to gentleness that wells up—an uncertain and impeded flow, no doubt—from the depths of his being; and we remember the callous murderer exhibiting a tender solicitude for some feeble animal. Is he a miser, he is occasionally tortured by promptings to an absurd generosity. Is he a loose-liver, he suffers from an unappeasable longing after chastity. The saint is tempted by his unconscious being to sin: the sinner to renounce the devil and all his works. In short, the character of the unconscious is as various as the character of man; although in this civilised world of ours, in which the dominant restrictions of society are in the direction of sex and decency, we are naturally inclined towards a generalisation that presents the unconscious as a creature of immodesty and lust....